“Take a look at this engineer’s face marinated in active spiritualism. It could be included in the natural history collection of every middle school, but it wasn’t among the visual aids in mine in the Thirteenth District of Vienna—included as a deterrent, I mean, a catastrophe of the West: the millenarian engineer, slide rule in his vest pocket, The Foundry: Handbook for Engineers in his bookcase, a disciple of Madame Blavatsky, Teutonic knight under the command of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who believed in the renewal of the world by Adolf Hitler . . . Your honored papa the classical scholar probably didn’t. On the contrary: he probably detested that popinjay with the artistic lock of hair falling across his forehead, but the category is the same: bourgeois fathers—John had a nasty name for them: ‘bloody fucking middle class’. . . and here, by way of comparison, another of my so-called uncles, Sir Agop Garabetian, the oil billionaire in a thousand-and-one-nights getup aboard his yacht off Cannes. It perhaps gives you an idea of the simultaneity of various worlds and of the reversal of environments I was exposed to at such a tender age! It bewilders the mind, my dear fellow. One struggles to unite such basically dissimilar realities, but it only works with the assistance of the imagination, and in the process, the authenticity of events becomes of secondary importance.—Here, take a look. Yes, that’s me as well. I admit, it’s an almost unbelievable transformation. The metamorphosis of an unkempt schoolboy into a Bond Street dandy—Stella’s doing—here we are in Stella’s car. In the summer of 1938—so already after the so-called Anschluss of Austria—we were still cruising around the Salzkammergut and surroundings in her open Hispano-Suiza—that’s right, she always wore a dirndl to go with that Old Testament profile: Sarah, Esther, Rachel . . . as for the Nazi stiffs, the car just took their breath away; a miracle of elegance, already almost ten years old at the time, from the absolutely best era of automobile manufacture—what lines, eh? And the thing ran like a gazelle. Too bad we didn’t know each other back then. It would have been such a treat for me to go speeding over the Grossglockner Pass with you—whereas you once told me your Volkswagen had to sweat even to make it over the Geislingen Pass in Swabia . . . of course Cousin Wolfgang, the son of his father, turned down an excursion in that vehicle of the Jewish plutocracy. . . And now let’s look a little further. Look how what you call authentic reality develops by leaps and bounds: this is a miserable photo of me with my “Teterist” buddies—comes from T.T.R., Tânar cu termin redus, the official designation for the one-year volunteers in the Romanian army—so me doing my military service. No, not in the war. God forbid!—I have to confess I misunderstood the zeitgeist’s charge to my generation. While my buddies marched straight off, heads held high, into a wonderful vision of the future and the open graves it contained, I turned on my heel to look back and understand what had happened, what was actually happening . . . to grasp its meaning, you see?—the sense that all those things were happening in order to be said—you understand what I’m saying, don’t you? The sense that it would never have happened if I didn’t say it—can you already see it in the way I look in this photo? Move your finger a second—yes, that’s me: third from the right in the standing row. The one with the wolfish gaze, in honor of our colleague Hesse! Nevertheless . . . I told you about the wolf in Bessarabia, didn’t I? . . . What became of my Viennese relatives? They were all buried in the rubble of a bombing raid in 1944: Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and Uncle Helmuth all together. Cousin Wolfgang had already died a hero’s death for Volk und Vaterland three years earlier.”